Tag Archives: art

“Hidden place” is a song by Björk from her fifth album Vespertine from 2001. According to the artist, the song is about “how two people can create a paradise just by uniting. You’ve got an emotional location that’s mutual. And it’s unbreakable. And obviously it’s make-believe. So, you could argue that it doesn’t exist because it’s invisible, but of course it does.”

The song has inspired many people, among them Sara Szabo, a Hungarian Iceland-maniac, who happens to be one of my favourite graphic designers. After a week-long trip to Iceland she decided to draw a comic book based on Björk’s song to express what she felt while wandering around in the beautiful nature.

“I wanted to use the whole lyrics of the song, but not just as “comic bubbles” next to the characters. I wanted to build the letters and words into the drawings so that the lyrics and the pictures become inseparable. The comics have only one main character, me. The whole comic book is me, really. My thoughts, my fears, my connection with nature. I wanted to show the things man-made objects and nature have in common: textures like the windows of a building or cell systems, vein structures, roads, boughs of trees. At the end of the book I wanted to show what kind of calmness I find in nature: in my plants next to the window, growing slowly. In the mountains of Iceland. In the grass where I lay down. And this calmness is everywhere, I find it every time I dive into my thoughts even if I’m in a big crowd. It is there in my head rising like lava in an erupting volcano.” – she wrote as a commentary.

Here’s a slide show of the comics accompanied by Hidden Places of Björk (WP doesn’t let me embed it), and you can take a look at Sara’s other works here.

After a road trip around the country, Rovina Cai, an Australian illustrator decided to document her adventures in the form of these wonderful illustrations. Spiced up with fantastical elements, the pictures look like scenes from old Icelandic sagas. The illustrations were bound into a tattered-style sketchbook.

“I love making illustrations that evoke a sense of intrigue; images that make you linger, hungry to know the story behind it. My work is often inspired by the past; from myths and fairy tales to gothic novels, these stories resonate with me because they bring a little bit of magic and wonder to the present day.” – she writes on her webpage.